Accurate and timely information on the state or location of numerous physical assets is essential in certain businesses. This often requires constant monitoring of assets, compiling of inventories, and easy storage and retrieval of this information. Innovations such as satellite communication networks and the Global Positioning System (GPS) have enabled automatic remote monitoring of assets.
Remote monitoring of a physical asset can be accomplished with an electronic device associated with the asset and in communication with a remote database. The electronic device may comprise one or more sensors acquiring information about the asset, and a transceiver for transmitting this information to a remote monitoring station and the remote database, as well as receiving commands or information from either remote location.
When many such assets are being monitored simultaneously, each with its own electronic device, one must always know which device is associated with which asset. In many asset-monitoring systems this association is established once and stored in a remote database in a computer. Clearly, it is essential that this association be established accurately and easily. One way this has been done in the past involves the participation of two people—a first person located at the asset and a second person at a database location remote from the asset. The first person at the asset speaks to the second person at the remote location, perhaps over a telephone, and reads out information uniquely identifying the asset and information uniquely identifying the electronic device. The second person then manually enters this information into the remote computer and establishes the association. In this method there are many possibilities for error—the spoken words may be misunderstood or entered incorrectly, and it is difficult to verify the information. The error in association may not be discovered for some time after the association is set up, with undesirable consequences.
Previously disclosed methods and systems for remote asset monitoring do not specifically address the problem of associating assets and monitoring devices while minimizing the chances of error. U.S. Pat. No. 5,959,275 to Hughes et. al. discloses a method for associating circuit cards with storage locations by entering data into a handheld device, but without feedback or validation. U.S. Patent Application Publication US 2003/0101108 A1 to Botham et. al. discloses a method and system for taking, receiving, and reconciling physical inventory data against an asset management database from a remote location. The data to be associated—a serial number and an asset number—are already associated in a barcode on each item. Reconciliation of this data with that in the database is done manually, with no verification. U.S. Pat. No. 6,496,777 to Tennison et. al. discloses a system for collecting and reporting information concerning mobile assets using the GPS, but again does not address the accurate association problem.
There is thus a need for a less error-prone method for quickly establishing and verifying the association.